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Thursday, 23 January 2014

'When writing the SPM, the authors are facing a dilemma: either they speak as scientists and…recognize that there are too many unknowns to make reliable predictions…or they try to convey what they “consensually” think…at the price of giving up scientific rigour. They deliberately chose the latter…they have distorted the scientific message into an alarmist message…'

'When writing the SPM, the authors are facing a dilemma: either they speak as scientists and…recognize that there are too many unknowns to make reliable predictions…or they try to convey what they “consensually” think…at the price of giving up scientific rigour. They deliberately chose the latter…they have distorted the scientific message into an alarmist message… [bold added; click here for the full, unedited version]'

These are the words of one of the world's most distinguished physicists, Pierre Darriulat. For nearly 50 years, his professional life has been
devoted to particle physics, nuclear physics, condensed matter physics,
and astrophysics. For seven years, he was Director of Research at CERN – one of the world’s largest, most famous, and respected laboratories.
The biography included with his submission tells us that Darriulat was spokesperson for

one of the two experiments that simultaneously discovered
the weak bosons and gave evidence for quarks and gluons being produced
in the form of hadronic jets.

This is bracing, no-nonsense talk from someone well equipped to
understand what’s going on. In Darriulat’s opinion, when scientists
write IPCC summaries not only are they are engaging in “a highly
subjective exercise,” they’re blatantly “ignoring basic scientific
practices.” Not mincing words, he declares that “Such behaviour is
unacceptable.”

In his opinion, the conclusions presented in the IPCC’s recentSummary
are “far from robust.” He thinks the IPCC “should consider it a duty to
answer scientifically” a number of concerns that have been raised by
its critics, but says the new IPCC report fails to do so. Instead, he
says, it sometimes appears to be “eluding rather than facing
embarrassing questions.”

Darriulat’s submission is worth reading in full (online here, PDF here). Near the end, he directly addresses questions posed by the committee’s Terms of Reference.

Keeping in mind Gore’s claim that nothing more complicated than high
school physics is involved, here’s what an actual physics virtuoso
thinks:

Where in the World - visitors since 16 May 2009

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